Daily Driver Diaries: Repeat Offender

When you’ve had a car for many years, some repairs become second nature. You just know that the car isn’t starting because of that wonky neutral safety switch wire with the broken tab or the paperclip wrapped in tinfoil you used instead of a fuse. Sometimes, there isn’t even anything shade-tree about it—it’s just a weak point in your system, like you were too lazy to make heat shields that fit with your new aluminum heads on a 440 so you always burn the same wire. Yeah, that last one is why, when the Polara’s 440 started running a bit more V7 than 8, we knew just where to look.

“It’ll be the No. 7 spark-plug wire,” Tom said as he rooted around between the master cylinder and the steering linkage. He snipped the zip-ties that held a ragged piece of fiberglass insulation around the firewall-adjacent plug wire and I snaked a telescoping mirror under the exhaust manifold for a look. For a big car, the Dodge engine bay sure is tight.

From my perch on the fender, examining the wire in an upside-down mirror, everything looked fine. Even Tom had a moment of doubt when we pulled the wire off and both plug and shielding looked normal. How could this be? It’s always that wire. Must I question my entire worldview? We started to reinstall the heat-shielding when a small, white smudge on the wire boot caught our attention. Tom flexed it and had an aha moment. It wasn’t the wire that had burned through, it was the boot. A wayward spark had wormed its way through the rubber and was intermittently arcing against the manifold instead of doing its job inside the cylinder. A razorblade and a new boot, and we were on all eight again. At least until next time.